Tag Archives: nature-nurture debate

When I read software engineer's James Damore's "manifesto", aptly titled Google's Ideological Echo Chamber, I fail to see many things. I'm sincerely flabbergasted, given my worldview, at not being able to find a single instance of "sexism", "biological determinism", "misogyny" or any other colorful expletive used by progressive radical egalitarians as a smear word. That's how different conceptual schemes can be once we exclude those who are being intellectually dishonest and have either not read the document or are deliberately misrepresenting it.

What I do see are the reasoned, balanced words of an intelligent young man who desires to simultaneously achieve both goals of truth and social justice at his workplace, with the best interests of his company in mind. I see a truly morally courageous individual who stood off against injustice as he saw it against a very different moral community from his own, which apparently happens to be having enormous influence in one of the most powerful companies on the planet. I can almost feel at times that he seemed to be walking on eggshells and wasn't as vocal as he could be.

How is this possible? How come the same document activates so wildly different semantic frames in different people? And who's right? Have I become so blind by my own cognitive biases to the point I'm missing that much bigotry and hatred?

I have a cluster of hypotheses to explain this mess. They are not novel; they are the coalescence of several different theoretical and empirical results. I'll briefly summarize on this post some of the arguments brought forth in my recent paper on political correctness.

First, we must assume that there exists a plurality of mutually inconsistent accounts of practical reason that human beings may enact. There is no "true and only" rationality; there are rationalities that fit different forms of life, infusing them with different aims and standards of success. Even on the same form of life, such as philosophical activity, we find competing and conflicting accounts of rationality [1].

But let us consider what is generally understood prototypically as "rationality", the like we expect to be expressed by bona fide philosophical and scientific cognition; this is a rationality of objectivity, guided by epistemic values such as empirical adequacy, internal consistency, predictive accuracy and explanatory power. With some exceptions such as constructive empiricists (that have some really nice arguments) and postmodern sociologists (that have some really underwhelming arguments), this type of reasoning deals fundamentally with a discourse that is truth-apt and truth stands as the supreme epistemic goal of this kind of rational inquiry.

But this is not the sort of rationality that is responsible for the crucifixion of James Damore. This is not the rationality being enacted by the so-called "social justice warriors."

Which rationality is it then? It all starts with this hypothesis: human beings are suckers for tribes [2],[3]. It's part of who we are. We relish ourselves into organizing (and re-organizing, and merging, and dissolving...) gangs, crews, bands, factions, congregations and the like; these are fractally expressed as families, political affiliations, religions, football teams, nationalities, army units and so on. Belonging to a social group is a fundamental source of well being for humans. No wonder then, given the importance it has on our lives, that a huge part of practical reason will be devoted to this setting.

Here enters the theory of identity-protective cognition [4], a realization of the expressivist account of rationality by philosopher Elizabeth Anderson [5].

The goal of this type of reasoning is not truth. It is securing the integrity of the group one belongs by defending its core beliefs and values with one's cognitive, affective and behavioral resources. This is manifested in many ways. Confirmation bias will rule that which reinforces the group's beliefs and values, and contrarian opinions can be easily interpreted as insults to the group's intellectual tradition. Adherents can become gratuitously aggressive against someone who disagrees with them in order to suppress dissenting thoughts. These are some of the aspects that make echo chambers and ideological uniformity so dangerous.

Progressive radical egalitarians have their own species of identity-protective cognition; here we have a rationality that aims at social justice and whose standards of success are non-epistemic values of political correctness such as inclusiveness, diversity, empathy and political uniformity.

The worldview of progressive radical egalitarians, I claim, has certain core beliefs which must be defended at all costs. I also hold it has an implicit underlying ethical principle which I've named the Generalized Difference Principle (GDP). This principle is inspired by a usage by philosopher of biology Neven Sesardić ([6], p.224) of the famous heuristic devised by political philosopher John Rawls in his monumental defense of liberal democracy [7].

According to the GDP, if you utter the statement that a population fares statistically better than a population with respect to a given mental trait where both and are of the same social genus , where this leverage of in comparison to is partly genetic in origin and finally, where is taken to be the dominant or oppressive group and the marginalized or oppressed group, then your assertion exemplifies a class of immoral acts associated with .

To speak it more plainly: if men are stated to be the oppressors of women, then if you claim, for instance, that men have on average a greater interest to pursue STEM careers than women due to natural inclinations, then you are sexist. In the semantics of progressive radical egalitarian worldview, there exists a strong conflation of facts and values. "Sexism" isn't just outright discrimination; factual statements can be sexist as well (and "racist", "ableist", "homophobic", etc).

Violations of the GDP are taken to be grievous because they necessarily violate one of the core beliefs of PC adherents; a thesis I call anthropological mental egalitarianism, the denial of between-group differences in cognition, affect and behavior that is traceable to genetic factors and socioeconomically significant.

Violations of the GDP are evil. And for that, James Domare needed to be punished by the moral community hegemonic to Google.

James Damore has been "Summered"; he dared to mention the contemporary behavioral genetics and differential psychology behind sex differences in cognition, affect and behavior which is established by existing empirical evidence to be partly genetic in origin (see, for instance, [8], [9], [10], [11])

Progressive radical egalitarians are mental environmentalists. They hold that the between-group variation of socioeconomically valuable psychological traits to be exclusively environmental in origin.

Even if the means and medians of arbitrary psychological traits in men and women were the same (and we have empirical evidence suggesting they are not), this would still not be enough. One of the most important facts about our species is how different the phenotypical distributions for arbitrary traits are among the sexes. For instance, as a group, women display significantly lesser intra-sexual variability for arbitrary mental traits [12]. There are more men in both tails of the cognitive-affective-behavioral spectrum; for example, concerning general intelligence, there are both more cognitively impaired and delayed men as well as more intellectually gifted men. Why is that? My favorite hypothesis is powerful but deeply counter-intuitive; overwhelmingly, your ancestors have been female.

For the contemporary defenders of social justice, sex differences in cognition, affect and behavior need to be a hundred percent environmental in origin due to core beliefs of their worldview. It would not fare well for with the theory of social oppression under which if groups are economically unequal, it is because some privileged group is oppressing another marginalized group. If mental environmentalism is false, however, in the complete absence of discrimination, there could still be economic inequality due to natural talent - inequality would not simply be an artifact of "social construction."

For those who are interested, I refer to Section 4 of my paper where I explain these concepts in detail.

Are we to infer the executioners of James Damore who are deeply offended and angered by his words merely stupid and irrational people? Not at all. They are enacting perfectly the rationality of identity-protective cognition. They have very successfully attempted to preserve the mandatory narrative script of social oppression theory by purging the one who dissented against anthropological mental egalitarianism into unemployment and social ostracism.